That Giant Sucking Sound

In 1992 Ross Perot coined the phrase, "giant sucking sound," to describe how the North American Free Trade Agreement would send American jobs scurrying off to Mexico.

Well, we have NAFTA now, and the migration that is worrying people today is not the jobs that are being lost to Mexico. It is the Mexicans who are coming to America looking for work.

Be that as it may, there is another giant sucking sound we need to be worried about: the high tech jobs that have been migrating overseas to China and Singapore. Today, as Intel opens a large semiconductor factory in China, its CFO offered some thoughts about why the plant was located in the Middle Kingdom and not the Middle West. Link here.

CFO Stacy Smith pointed out that when the Chinese government enacted fiscal stimulus, its aim was to encourage and facilitate capital investment. It offered tax incentives-- read, tax cuts-- for manufacturers to offset the cost of investment.

When the American government passed a stimulus bill last year it focused on public works, and especially, paying the salaries of public sector unionized workers.

Economists will argue about these points. For now I will not.

I am more interested in CFO Smith's observation that the American educational system is not producing graduates who know enough science and math to qualify for jobs in these new factories. That got my attention, and it should get yours.

For some time now the educational establishment in this country has chosen to emphasize self-esteem over academic achievement. It has downplayed science and math where there are right and wrong answers, and emphasized expressions of personal feelings where, after all, each child is the leading authority about what he feels. No teacher can downgrade you because she knows what you feel better than you do.

If you are trying to enhance self-esteem in children, regardless of whether they have earned it or not, you are going to find the scientific ethos inimical to your values.

The scientific method allows reality to prove or disprove your working hypotheses. And we know that no small number of our education gurus are allergic to reality testing and trial-and-error thinking. They want to inculcate the values of idealism, where reality is never allowed to get in the way of your love affair with an idea.

Children compete in math and science; some do better, some to worse. Those who do worse feel worse about themselves. That motivates them to work harder to do better.

American educators have found that to be unacceptable. In place of technically competent workers our schools are producing well-rounded happy-go-lucky individuals who excel at having a good time and who feel good about themselves, no matter what.

I was especially struck by this passage, where CFO magazine summarizes the views of Intel's Stacy Smith: "Even entry level positions on Intel's factory floors require some advanced technical training, and the plants also employ PhDs in material science and physics. But math and science curricula in primary school systems in the United States are comparatively weak, he said, and the population of university students pursuing math, science, and engineering has dropped."

So, cultural values matter. You can wax poetic all you want about high tech jobs, but if the school system devalues math and science you will simply not have the qualified workers to fill the positions.

Our counterculture values, translated into school curricula, have produced a giant sucking sound that is taking high-paying high-tech jobs to Asia.